Hi and welcome to the first communication from the newly mandated NEM Ventures on behalf of the NEM Community.

We had intended to post this over the weekend but the team had various things to attend to after the past few weeks of debate, votes etc. We are now back on deck and ready to get stuck in, this is a summary message to communicate how we will work over the next few weeks and where to find information etc.

As you may be aware, a public vote was held recently which will change the way the NEM Community Fund will function, these changes will impact the project you have submitted a proposal for to the NCF. If you missed these changes, below are some useful links:

There were a number of constructive comments made during the discussion of the proposal, all of which we were grateful to receive and some of which enabled us to alter our proposal for the better. We thank those involved for that.

This message gives an initial indication of what to expect, further information will be provided in subsequent updates over the next few weeks.

Communicating to all parties
We will communicate with the whole community as directly and transparently as possible, and have composed a Communication Plan to do so. We will listen to feedback and create an FAQ document for Ventures so information is consistent and publicly available in one place.

Incorporation and timings
We are incorporating a capital fund based on XEM, this is something that has never been done before. To create a legal entity and put NEM in a fantastic position as a formal capital fund. We are taking advice currently, and anticipate that the structure will be up and running in 2-3 months, in line with the milestones listed in the proposal, as soon as a more precise date is known this will be released.

Backlog Projects:
There are 24 projects that were submitted before the conclusion of the NEM Ventures public vote. We have committed as a team to review all of them as soon as possible and in parallel to the set up of the entity. A full list of these and the order they will be assessed, assuming project owners still wish to proceed, is provided at the end of this message.

All project owners will be communicated with directly with a copy of this post and explaining this process; initial communications will go out in the next week. We will assess projects on their current state, longevity, the management team, and scalability.

The proposal may be accepted or rejected, or we may work with the teams to alter the business model to give it the best chance of success. Where proposals are better suited to the Not For Profit entity, the process for this will be explained to those projects.

Proposals accepted will not be able to be funded until the legal entities are incorporated

Below are the projects that are currently in the project backlog from the NCF records, if any are missing do please let us know.

CarbonClick

MuleChain

Mobi Rideshare

Sernez Proposal

NEMWill

D.FX Proposal: FX Settlement Ecosystem

BlockIDE

BESC

AEM (Accounting Enterprise Middleware)

Trive

CryptoAds Marketplace

GiveMatters

Quizzycash

Eterly

Blockchain Accounting Software

MyCryptoSaver

MarginX

Empleos

CryptoConfirm

Vireef

Bitlumens

AirGap - The New Crypto Wallet Standard

Atomic Network

The Magic of NEM - Book

Future Projects:
Future projects or proposals will come direct through the NEM Ventures website, the Foundation Community, or any individual or group we connect with via our networks. No new proposals will be considered until the current backlog has been processed.

We encourage projects to contact us and submit proposals, the review will have to wait until the backlog above is cleared. The process for these submissions will be published in the next two weeks.

Currently funded Projects:
All projects that have been approved for community vote and funding, will continue to be managed by the existing NCF Committee through to completion, the process will not change nor will the contact people for each project. Where the committee would like support, NEM Ventures will provide it in the form of reviews, guidance and recommendations but decisions and fund distribution will be made by the committee.

Contact Information
If there are any questions, comments or concerns please feel free to reply to this thread or:

1. First cut website to allow us to post up FAQ’s, contact forms etc.
For now it is quite limited and we will go through a proper branding exercise in due course but it is sufficient to get us started. https://nemventures.io and the FAQ’s page is https://nemventures.io/faq/

2. We have migrated all the documents (Ventures proposal(s), backlog proposal documents etc to a NEM Ventures storage account
Where possible we have updated the links in the various posts, telegram messages, a couple left to but if you find any that appear dead, let us know and we will point them to the correct place again.

3. MOST IMPORTANTLY - Communications with the projects is starting today
The email below has been sent to a first batch of backlog projects. Our intention is to send this to each project over the next week or so, in small batches to try and keep the responses manageable etc, we expect to have sent this to all projects by the end of the week.

Hi,

You are receiving this email because you have a project/company in the NCF Proposal backlog that is due for processing by NEM Ventures going forward. If you no longer wish to proceed with your proposal, please let us know by response to this email or by completing the form at the end of this email.

We would like to thank you for the patience you have already shown with the proposal process, and the NEM Ventures initiation.

Update:

We are working hard behind the scenes to get the various entities incorporated and as promised we wish to start assessing the project’s in the NCF backlog in parallel, we have a couple of meetings early this week with audit, tax and accounting agencies.

To set expectations, we will be unable to fund any project until the incorporation is complete, however we intend to have those projects that are selected ready to go very quickly after that point; hence processing in parallel.

We have engaged a KYC/AML service on a trial basis which we will require all companies (and directors of the companies) to undergo. This aggregates publicly available information from various international sources and provide an efficient way to limit identity fraud type behaviour, they are frequently used for ICOs and the assessment process is likely to be similar to any KYC process you have been through for Crypto already. We are getting the service set up, as soon as it is ready we will ask projects that are keen to proceed to undertake the checks.

All current proposals in the backlog have been provided to NEM Ventures and are stored in a secured Google drive folder, once you have completed the form below, we will add your email address to the relevant folder and if any additional team members require access please just let us know by sending an email from your primary email address on the proposal.

Naturally some of these proposals were written a while ago now, if you feel there is additional information or that they need updating you will have chance to do so - flag it on the form below and we can sort it out. We know for example a couple of projects now have MVP technology platforms in place, others have signed MoUs with partners etc.

Next Step

The next step for all projects that wish to continue with this process is to is to use the link below with 14 days of receiving this email

This email is being sent to all projects, but is being staggered to try avoid one big rush, it will be sent in small batches over a few days. Projects will be considered in the order they are at present in the backlog, any that do not respond within 14 days will be moved to the end of the queue, and no response for 30 days will result in them being removed from the backlog to make space for new projects. The link is a Hubspot form, which will collect some basic data to ensure we have the current state of your project and help us get up to speed with you as quickly as we can.

Link removed to avoid spurious entries

We very much look forward to working with you over the coming weeks and months, we are here to support projects do great things on NEM for the good of the projects, the community and the ecosystem in general, if you have any questions please do let us know.

4. Conversations are ongoing with governance/audit/tax advisors in relation to incorporation, as are KYC/DD service conversations

A quick update on the backlog projects, we have sent messages out to all projects to reconfirm interest in pursuing investment, also updated on telegram a few times to try and capture all projects.

As indicated in those messages, projects that did not respond within the time frame will lose their place in the queue, any unresponsive after 30 days will be assumed to be not interested and removed from the pipeline. We are aware of a couple that mail issues and have resolved those if there are other issues, please send a message to [email protected].

The current order of processing is below. We are still working primarily on incorporation of the legal entities and will begin working through the projects below from next week around the incorporation work. Initial reviews will likely be fairly high level to try and assess each project for appropriateness, whether for investment or better served waiting for the NFP grant process and likely level of effort required to perform full review, arrange KYC/AML checks etc. If projects have any additional information to supply, updates etc, then please wait for the high level review to provide this, we will take it all into account.

Communications will be sent to the earlier projects individually over the next week or so to start this process. I would remind projects that the reviews are happening in parallel with legal incorporation, no funds can be released until that incorporation is complete.

Yes, dave is right. There are a number of projects still being processed via the old system. These projects all passed the public vote prior to the ventures vote. These projects still have outstanding milestones to get through, so a budget has been allocated to them out of the NCF pot to provide autonomy in processing those projects and milestones.

To clarify. NF is not involved in the NCF and NEM Ventures.
Origins and Rockectshoes get the votes before NCF move to NEM Ventures. So a group of community volunteers are reviewing those 2 projects and checking the milestones.

After having researched a large number of jurisdictions, delays with law firms and other obstacles, we have mostly decided the jurisdiction in which to incorporate both the parent company of ventures, and nem ventures itself. It was not intended to take this long, but its been quite difficult to find the right jurisdiction and find a way to move the NCF out of anonymous hands and into a legal entity in a fully legal and above board manner. We do not intend on cutting any corners, so that has caused some considerable delays as we work out the legalities of what we need to do. That said, we are still progressing and things are moving forward at a reasonable pace.

First we need to get through the backlog of projects. We have done the first review for all, and have sent out questionnaires to all. We are now waiting on these questionnaires back. Some have come back already and we are starting to process them. The list of projects has dwindled since we first collated the backlog projects for various reasons, so the list is shrinking already and there are some we are more interested in than other, but we will release more details on that at a later stage.

That said, we cannot pull the trigger with any projects until we have incorporated both the parent company and the nem ventures entity. This is expected to take a little more time to process all the legal paper work, and then also the legal work for transferring in the NCF to the new CLG account. This may or may not involve a trust to sit between the NCF and the CLG as a conduit. Working this out with lawyers currently.

Its roughly expected that we can start looking at new projects beyond the backlog in the new year. Although do not take that as a deadline, but more of a tentative guideline. Everything is subject to change as we are going through the set up phase.

Hi all. Apologies for a bit of a gap in the updates, I made a couple on TG that I didnt copy here but should have, they were more on reviews.

We are finally getting the legal docs drawn up for incorporation after a fair bit of back and forth. We hope to have a better estimate in the coming week or so but we are thinking weeks not months now. There are still some hoops to get bank accounts etc but we have a plan, validated by the legal team and a big 4 audit company prepared to help validate origin of funds so its paperwork now but the direction is clear. Once we have the paperwork done and lodged, we will share as much as we are able to publicly.

We will be incorporating out of Gibraltar for various reasons, mostly because it has good, clear DLT legislation, crypto friendly banking and a clear tax system. There is also an ecosystem developing of services companies (lawyers, accountants etc) that are now knowledgable in crypto and offshore investment which is perfect for us. Even the big 4 there are crypto aware.

In terms of investment reviews, as @kodtycoon mentioned we have done a first run through all backlong ones. We intend to start reviewing responses to the first round questions this and next week, assuming the incorp stays smooth. We had planned to have this done already but we had to prioritise incorp. Several projects have yet to respond, we would encourage them to do so but not to rush and give the answers and supporting docs full consideration.

We have also been in a position to help with arranging two very interesting partnerships. We cant share detail just yet due to NDAs but will be making plenty of noise about them as soon as we can…likely early Dec.

In terms of new proposals we are still closed while we clear the backlog and incorp but expect end of 2018 go open again. See the NEM ventures website for FAQ on how best to prepare for that if you are one of these www.nemventures.io